The “Discoverer” and the “Informant”

Abstract

The first object that was accessioned by the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Louvre Museum was a statue of the ruler Gudea (c. 2120 BC) from Tello (ancient Girsu) in southern Iraq (Fig. 1). When one looks at the hands of this statue closely, signs of damage and restoration can easily be discerned. In fact, the earliest photographs published in the excavation reports show this statue without its hands (Fig. 2). This absence was interpreted by the Louvre curator André Parrot as an ancient act of iconoclasm carried out in the late third millennium BC, after the time of Gudea: “By breaking the hands, the vandal believed to annihilate more completely the effectiveness of the statue erected in the Eninnu [temple of Ningirsu]” (Parrot 1948: 162).